Date: August 11, 2009

Mircea Cărtărescu pays homage to women—respectable ladies and sex bombs, girls of fifteen or fifteen billion, women who sleep with their eyes open and women who appear in your dreams simply “because they are women, because they are not men.”
When the book comes out in English—and ...

August 11, 2009

Mircea Cărtărescu pays homage to women—respectable ladies and sex bombs, girls of fifteen or fifteen billion, women who sleep with their eyes open and women who appear in your dreams simply “because they are women, because they are not men.”
When the book comes out in English—and ...
read more...

July 27, 2009

The French government announced this
July that it has granted Norman Manea the title of Commandeur
dans l'Ordre des Arts et Letters, the highest rank in the Legion
of Honor, in recognition of "his great talent and open,
vigilant and humanist body of work written without concession."
read more...

July 16, 2009

Best Translated Book panelists
(Monica Carter, Scott Esposito, Susan Harris, Annie Janusch, Brandon Kennedy,
Bill Marx, Michael Orthofer , Chad W.
Post, and Jeff Waxman) have been reading like wild in preparation for Best Translated Book awards,
to be announced by Three Percent / Open Letter in ...
read more...

June 23, 2009

On June 11, the
Romanian Institute for Cultural and Humanistic Research (which is
located in Venice) launched a blockbuster bilingual anthology of
writing by Gellu Naum, La quinta essenza / The Fifth Essence
(Treviso: Editing Edizioni, 2006). The book includes a broad
chronology of the great ...
read more...

About this issue: Special

This July, The Observer Translation Project leaves its usual format to present a special CRISIS ISSUE. Things are tough all over. Hard Times suddenly feels like the book of the moment. The global economic crisis impacts life as we know it, and viewed from Bucharest the effects reverberate in domains that include geo-politics and publishing in Romania and abroad, with the crisis at The Observer Translation Project as an instance of a universal phenomenon.
read more...

Although Romanians view the last twenty years with a degree of burned out idealism that verges on jaundice (doubtless to the surprise of many Americans), this is the year to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the mockery of human rights for which it stood. In June, the Guardian posted Stories from Easter Europe, a collection that included “Zgaiba” by Romanian novelist, Stelian Tănase.
read more...

Emiluţa has an unfortunate thought. She’ll throw herself
off the top of the building. Why? What the fuck? Let’s say for the cause of
PeaceonEarth, for the slumdogs,
Europe, for
the lonely. Which is to say she doesn’t have a ghost of a reason. Viva
Walachia!
The way things stand, if ...

The bearded man was the owner of an apothecary shop where he worked with two apprentices. Nobody paid me any mind, so I spent all day in what was supposed to be the shop. I say this because it was a large, dark room full of odors—a mix of smells from everywhere. The room hadn’t been cleaned ...

It happened once as never before-y, ‘cause if it couldn’t be true, it wouldn’t make a story about the time when the poplar tree made berries and the willow tree broke out in cherries, when bears began to brawl with their tails, and wolf and lamb, unfurling their sails, threw arms around each ...

Notes &Comments

It took me a while to find time to read the whole thing, but the roundtable discussion that went up a week ago over at the Observer Translation Project is really excellent. Susan Harris (of Words Without Borders), Chad Post (of Open Letter and Three Percent),
novelist Norman Manea, and translator Susan Bernofsky offer thoughtful
exchanges on topics such as marketing and editing translated
literature, team translations, issues of domestication in translation,
and the appeal and value of international literature. For example,
here’s Susan Bernofsky on editing translations:

The same editing skills that apply to the best editors
of English apply to the best editors of literature translated into
English as well. Great editors have a sixth sense that tells them
exactly what a book’s style wants to be and shows them the spots where
it diverges from this ideal. If there’s an outright mistake in the
translation, an editor may or may not be able to spot it (depending on
whether it breaks the skin of the book’s mood) – but that’s not the
editor’s job, that’s the job of the translator.

The Observer
Translation Project is...a great place to get your bearings about Romanian literature, old and
new. I love this site because it's like a lit journal and a history
lesson filled with well-thought out lit crit and incisive commentary. Dig
it, friends.

What's worse than Western capitalism? Capitalism that hides behind a hammer and a sickle. Moldovan journalist and translator Leo Butnaru sends a caustic letter from Moldova,
where the April 7 elections were followed by heavy protests against the
Communist election victory. Butnaru explains how the elections were
manipulated – a large percent of Moldavians working abroad were
prevented from voting – and the perverse nature of the regime: "We're
dealing here with a mutant that is hard to describe. This
fabulous mongrel, communo-capitalism looks exceptionally repulsive in
the fun house mirrors of mysteriously still ongoing, retarded bolshevism,
with which European autocracy and diplomacy nevertheless go on
flirting. I would very much like to know, for instance, why last March
his Excellency, the former British ambassador to Chisinau, John Beyer, allowed himself to be decorated
by tovarish Voronin, a dictator, a hypocrite, a show-off, a scoffer at
the idea of Europe - an inveterate bolshevik, pure and simple, who
benefits from 'multilaterally-developed' capitalism - to borrow a
phrase from the old Party manuals."

Beyer is not the only
politician whom Butanaru names: his list of foreign dignitaries queuing
up to be decorated also includes FIFA president Sepp Blater, Secretary General of the European Council Terry Davis, Austrian EU politician Erhard Busek, Bulgaria's president Gheorghi Pirvanov and the Croatian president Stjepan Mesic.

The Observer Translation Project just posted a roundtable discussion on our favorite topic, including our very own Susan Harris along with Chad Post of the Three Percent blog and Open Letter publishers, as well as translator Susan Bernofsky whose translation of Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye I just read (and will soon comment on).

Here’s an excerpt with Chad honing in on an aspect of reading books in translation that many of us face:

This sounds really bad, but in a roundabout way, I'm
motivated by my monolingualism. After college I fell in love with Latin
American literature—especially Cortazar—and started trying to revive my
Spanish so that I could read the dozens of books I'd heard about, but
which had yet to be translated. By the time I got serious about this
though, I was off and reading a ton of French Oulipo books. Then titles
from Eastern Europe. I'll never be able to speak a dozen languages
(like translator Michael Henry Heim does), so I have to rely on English
publishers to make available all the great books being written around
the world. Probably just an ADD thing, but by not specializing in one
language/literature, I feel like I can indulge my roaming interests,
and look for books to publish from Asia, then Latin America, then
France, then the Nordic Countries, etc., etc.

World-famous
novelist Norman Manea, two premier experts in the realm of literature
in translation—Susan Harris of Words Without Borders and Chad Post of
Three Percent and Open Letter—and award-winning translator from German
Susan Bernofsky address a literary zone in permanent crisis: the world
of literature in translation.

They manage to
cover a lot of ground pretty quickly—from editing translations, to the
market for translations, to why the panelists read translations—and
it’s interesting to see how they approach all of the issues from
slightly different angles. Definitely worth a read.

The latest entry in The Guardian‘s series of
short stories about the transformations of Eastern Europe post-1989 is Stelian
Tanase’s Zgaiba,
translated from the Romanian by Jean Harris. (Who runs the Observer Translation
Project, which is the best source online for information about Romanian
literature.)… this is probably my favorite story in The
Guardian series.

"The basic question for foreigners in Romania," writes Jean Harris, who runs the Translation Project for the Observator Cultural, " is 'what the hell are you doing here?' That's the existential question, and the sine qua non of successful Romanian-ness
involves addressing it to one's self six times a day." The only escape,
she suggests, is a healthy sense of the absurd and warm friendships.
And with that she introduces Razvan Petrescu, the focus of this month's issue.

"Dad
went and died. He was a quiet guy, slightly on the mystic side, with
two deep furrows on either side of his nose. He was given to occasional
bouts of melancholy, and on Sundays he’d do funny stuff over lunch.
He'd toss the soup spoon towards the light fixture hanging from
the ceiling, then try to catch it. He always failed. Sometimes he'd
break the fixture, sometimes – the soup plate. The fat yellow soup
would soak progressively into the table cloth first, then into Dad's
neatly-pressed trousers, and finally make its way down to the Persian
rug, where it became extremely visible and stable. I was in stitches.
Not Mom, though. I'm still in stitches now as I look at the Order of Socialist Labor Class III
awarded to Dad back in '68 or so. It's a rather nice box, dark cherry
in color, soft to the touch, containing a silver medal, a red ribbon
and Dad. The medal represents our country's insignia on a bed of
sunbeams."

Observator
Cultural throws
a spotlight on Norman Manea, a
writer Orhan Pamuk described as "one of the great men of
Romania ".
The site's Translation Project
features a number of synopses of his works, an illustrated bibliography and a translation of Manea's "Sentimental Education",
"a charming, sexy, wistful and ferocious
take on Flaubert's novel
of the same name…”

Romanian author Norman Manea won the third Observator Cultural
Opera Omnia Award this month from the Observer
Translation Project, an international magazine of Romanian
literature in translation. See Totalitarianism Today for an
in-depth history of Manea and study of his work. Manea was a guest
editor for WWB in 2004, and we also published his “Letter
to Ernesto Sábato,” translated from the Romanian by Stephen
Kessler and Daniela Hurezanu.

The Observer
Translation Project
is devoting this month to the work of Romanian writer Norman Manea,
who recently won the 2009 Gheorghe Crăciun Lifetime Achievement
Award. Critic Carmen Musat describes Manea's work: A
witness to the paired totalitarianisms of the 20th century, Norman
Manea is a writer of survivals. His medium is Romanian. He belongs to
the world. (....) Among
other precious stones, Jean Harris translates "Sentimental
Education",
a short by Manea.

Forget
the fact that I am a globalized mutt who has developed an intense mistrust of
any kennel-- American or Romanian-- and prefers to live in cars where the
windows are open. Forget my own misgivings about nationalism, patriotism,
self-esteem, and resume voyeurism. Forget everything I've ever said or suggeted
about politics and conspiracy and other forms of failed literature. For there
is hope and excitement on the Romanian horizon. The Observer Translation Projectlanguage barrier by providing translations of previously
untranslated fictional gems. For those who long enchanted by the misgivings of
the Romanian pen, this project is an oasis.
aims to bridge the

A
Romanian writer is highlighted in every issue, thus opening the doors of
cross-cultural discourse for the discovery of relics and treasures. Apart from
translating novels, stories, and essays, the Project includes critical essays
and translation notes.

The Observer Translation Project is a relatively new website featuring news, reviews, and samples from and about Romanian authors…. there’s a healthy amount of information available on this site, including samples from a host of authors, a list of forthcoming translations from the Romanian, synopses of a number of Romanian books, and reviews/essays.

Definitely worth checking out, both for the features… and for the blog, which tracks information about Romanian literature.

A limited team is about to trigger a genuine revolution in the Romanian literary landscape. Their “weapons” are their translators and the internet. Last September, four journalists on the staff of the Observator Cultural weekly created The Observer Translation Project site to promote contemporary Romanian authors abroad. With the help of ten translators, fragments from Romanian literary works are published in [multiple]… languages. This ambitious project receives financial support from the weekly Observator Cultural… the credit goes… to the extremely motivated people creating the site. The number of visitors is constantly growing and frequently enough fragments from the translated literary works feature on some of the most important literary sites in Europe and the
United States.

Now in its fifth issue, this online international magazine features Romanian writing in translation. The site's literary pieces translate into English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish, with some guest languages. The director of the Project, Jean Harris, received a 2007-08 ICWT Translation Grant in support of her work on the selection from “The Boars Were Mild”/ Mistreţii erau blânzi from Iarna Bărbaţilor / Men in Winter by Ştefan Bănulescu, that opened the first issue of The Observer Translation Project.

A while back we linked to an article about the fantastic translation project by the Romanian cultural journal Observator Cultural. But things have developed in leaps and bounds since then, with translations in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, Dutch and Polish. The first edition was dedicated to the writer Stefan Banulescu, the second to Gheorghe Craciun – featuring an excerpt from Craciun's novel "Pupa Russa" and an essay by Caius Dobrescu which presents Craciun as "a Bertrand Russell with a Wagnerian twist"

This, the third edition, is dedicated to the author Stelian Tanase. There are a few things which a "prospective reader of Romanian literature might like to know" writes the translator, writer and head of the translation project, Jean Harris, by way of an introduction. For example, that in Romania, "we're in a world capital of stories because we're in the world capital of regime change". Before moving on to Stelian Tanase, she provides a brief overview of Romanian history and the fundamentals of Romanian literature: "In the long view, what counts is that the Romanian problem has been 'how to survive.' Often it has been, 'how not to die.' And often it has been 'how to die' – finding a spiritual position that makes death a friend. In this context, story telling equals salvation on several planes." In Tanase's case this mindset is fuelled by the Blues.

In related Romanian-literature-in-translation news, the Observer Translation Project is up and running, featuring previously untranslated Romanian fiction (now translated into En/Fr/Ge/It/Sp/Du/Pol) as well as critical essays (En) on the featured writers and on contemporary Romanian lit in general. The first two numbers have been dedicated to Stefan Bănulescu and Gheorghe Crăciun, respectively. I strongly recommend the excerpt from Crăciun’s Pupa Russa for a lovely account of going to school and learning to read in the People’s Republic of Romania. Kudos to the translator!

OTP showcases previously untranslated fiction. We highlight a "pilot" author each month. This is the place to learn about Romanian writers, find updates on Romanian writing abroad, read CV’s, take a look at covers published in countries around the globe, check out the bibliographies, dip into author photos, search our steadily growing archive, and discover essays that put Romanian writing in context. Look for single author fiction issues every month, with free-wheeling updates in between.

Sounds very promising -- and we hope that other nations have a go at their own versions.